In an optical character recognition system it is desirable to provide a data lift where each individual photocell of an array of photocells establishes its scale range based upon the reflectance of the media currently being scanned. Since the media can be multi-colored or have varying levels of background reflectance, it is desirable to scale each individual photocell between the reflectance it is currently observing and black resulting in different scale ranges of photocells in the proximity of one another.